New horizons

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Noa Frenkel, an Israeli contralto with an impressive globe
trotting career, arrives from Holland, where she currently resides, for two
contemporary music programs. The first concert will take place on February 9 at
the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and at the Jerusalem Music Center on February
10. She will perform pieces by Israeli composer Menahem Tzur and American
composer John Cage.

Offerings by the Israeli Contemporary Players are
always interesting, but Frenkel ‘s other program – her solo recital later this
month at HaTeiva, the ensemble’s home, a small concert hall in Jaffa where it
really happens – is even more intriguing.

In an interview from her home
in The Hague, Frenkel talks about her music world view.

“Beautiful
classical music is not lacking, and why not to perform it? But the thing is, how
long is it possible to chew it? It is like a museum, where everybody seems to
know how to perform it (which, by the way, is wrong, I suggest). Lately, I have
been performing a lot of contemporary music, along with Mahler, Bach, Verdi and
Mozart. I enjoy both worlds immensely, and I think that without contemporary
music, something would be missing. This something is an act of creating new
things. It could be marvelous, and it could be awful. You don’t know if it will
soar or flop miserably. Even the composer hasn’t heard it if it’s the premiere.
This is alive, this is here and now.”

Frenkel stresses that her
activities in the field of the contemporary music have given her a fresher view
of music of the past. “I see the composers of the past as living persons. I can
go through Bach’s score and say, ‘Well, probably this was not his best day.’ For
me, their music is something very live. I do not take for granted ready-made
ideas of style and approach – I deconstruct and analyze familiar old pieces and
then put them together again. This is because I am in constant contact with
composers.”

Frenkel, who started as a classical singer, began singing
contemporary music almost by chance: “Most of my friends at the Rubin Academy
were composers, and they needed somebody to sing their pieces,” she
explains.

She continued her studies in Holland, “and I was pretty sure
that I had come to sing Baroque and classics, but also here I was invited by a
local ensemble to sing contemporary pieces – and quite soon I realized that it
suits me, and this is what I really want to do!”

Since then, she has been
performing world premieres of the new pieces, some of them composed for
her.

In regard to her upcoming recital at HaTeiva, Frenkel says, “I love
challenges. So when the artistic director of the Dan Yuhas ensemble
suggested that I should appear at HaTeiva, I thought, ‘Okay a recital is usually
a singer accompanied by a piano, but why not to take it to the extreme?’ So it
will be my solo with live electronics. The question that currently preoccupies
me is what I define as solitude in the age of mass media. Nowadays, with
social networks like Twitter and Facebook, with smartphones that are always with
us, we can hardly be alone, for good and for bad. What is happening to us? So I
took a piece by Morton Feldman, who is one of my favorite composers – it is a
terzet for a singer and two pre-recorded voices of my own. This is quite
captivating. It is like talking to tombstones or to the dead. I will probably
perform songs by Purcell and Mahler in my arrangement for electronic music.
There also is a program that turns our voice into something else – and this is
also a musical version of the same question: What happens to us while we are
living our lives deep inside the world of mass communication? The Internet is an
amazing thing – I travel a lot, and I keep in touch with my family and friends
via Skype, I found materials I need for my work and maintain professional
contacts. That said, we can hardly concentrate on anything; we are never alone,”
she says.

Frenkel sums up: “I am not going to lecture or teach anybody,
and I have more questions than answers. I just want people to enter this musical
world and to be aware of the situation, both musically and socially. After all,
this is just an hour-long concert. And by the way, to my best knowledge, I’ve
never heard of a solo recital of contemporary music of a singer supported only
by electronic devices and not by his fellow musician who is often a full partner
in the music-making.”

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